Separation under thermogravitational effects in binary mixtures

The Influence of Bounding Plates on Species Separation in a Vertical Thermogravitational Column

In this paper, an analytical and numerical analysis of the species separation in a binary mixture is performed. The main objective is to study the influence of the thickness and the nature of the bounding plates of the thermogravitational column (TGC) on species separation. The theory of Furry, Jones and Onsager is extended to the cases where bounding conducting walls enclose the TGC. The governing 2-dimensional equations are solved numerically using COMSOL Multiphysics software. A good agreement is found between the analytical and the numerical results. It is shown that the determination of the thermal diffusion coefficient, DT, from the measurement of the vertical mass fraction gradient of binary solutions, does not depend on the temperature difference imposed on the vertical column either on the outer walls of the cavity or on the inner walls in contact with the binary solutions. However, it is found that this result is no longer valid in the case of a binary gas. To our knowledge, in all earlier studies, dealing with the measurement of Soret coefficients in binary fluids, the nature and the thickness of the bounding walls were not considered.

Numerical and Analytical Studies of Soret-Driven Convection Flow Inside an Annular Horizontal Porous Cavity

This paper studies the species separation of a binary fluid in a porous cavity between two horizontal concentric cylinders, submitted to a temperature gradient. The thickness of the cavity is e=Ro−Ri, where Ri and Ro are the internal and external radius, respectively. The numerous previous experiments performed in thermogravitational vertical columns (TGCs) showed that in order to obtain a significant separation, the thickness of the cell must be very small, compared with its height. Therefore, in our configuration, we considered e≪Ri. The solution is assumed to be axisymmetric. Under the assumptions of parallel flow and forgotten effect, an analytical solution is obtained using Maple software, and the results are compared with those found numerically using Comsol Multiphysics. In natural convection, our results are in very good agreement with those evaluated with a regular perturbation method in powers of the dimensionless gap width ε=eRi  of order 15, and with the Galerkin method. The species separation calculated for our configuration is very close to the one obtained in a TGC column of height: H=πRi. One of the main interests of the analytical solution presented here is that it can be used as a basic solution for a stability study analysis.

Appling the computational fluid dynamics studies of the thermogravitational column for N2-CO2 and He-Ar gas mixtures separation

In the present work, three-Dimensional stationary numerical simulations were accomplished for a deeper understanding of the gas mixtures separation by the thermogravitational column. To address the optimum condition and examine the limitation of the process, the thermogravitational column behavior has been thoroughly analyzed. First, the simulation model was validated by the experimental results of Youssef et al. then the model was developed for the pilot column. The mixture of helium-argon was chosen as feed composition. It was concluded that the variation of the separation factor in relation to pressure for both columns was almost the same. The optimum condition verified as p = 0.2  atm , θ = 0.4 , m ° = 4   SCCM $p=0.2\text{atm},\theta =0.4,m{\degree}=4\,\text{SCCM}$ .